Thoughts on the Wind

 

“It is a pitiful degeneracy in our modern life that we are not more often transported out of ourselves by the eternal things that surround us.

Consider the wind!  One of the best tests you can apply to yourself as to whether you are lost to the primeval grandeur of the world, taking it all for granted, is to note your attitude to the arbitrary motions of the wind.  Do you take the wind for granted? 

 Do you only notice it at all if it is wildly furious, madly violent, bitterly freezing?  Or, on the other hand, is the least breath of it upon your face like the touch of the remote Past?  

Do you never feel it without thinking what a miraculous phenomenon it is, this invisible and yet most living presence, as it moves over the city, over the land, over the sea?  Nothing can excel the wind in awakening from the depths of our natures those far-away memories which seem to carry with them the very essence of life..."

(John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude) 

What Poetry Does For Us

"The profoundest gift of the spirit of poetry to a person’s secret culture is the gift of peace.  Poetry can reconcile a man or a woman to the simplest and barest situation.  As long as the forlornest patches of earth and sky are left to us to be enjoyed by the mind we can feel ourselves into the mod of Achilles crying aloud to Thetis or of Prometheus defying the wide heaven.  Between the shutters of the most sordid attic the Holy Grail itself can be seen, traversing the sky, between chimney and chimney!  Where a few blades of grass can grow in the wretchedest yard, there are immortal spirits of Dante’s limbo welcome their last proud initiate.  Under a luminous poetic light that falls where it wills all the simple recurrent details of our days gather an amplitude and a mystic significance.  Birth and death, food and fire, sleep and waking, the motions of the winds, the cycles of the stars, the budding and falling of the leaves, the ebbing and flowing of the tides – all these things have, for thousands of years, created an accumulated tradition of human feeling: and what culture appropriates from the art of poetry is the power to realise this tradition, to realise it ever more reverently and ever more obstinately." 

(John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture)

Learning fom Nature

"…For routine is man’s art of copying the art of Nature.  In Nature all is routine.  The seasons follow one another in sacred order; the seed ripens, the leaf expands, the blossom and the fruit follow, and then comes the fall. 

   Routine is the rhythm of the universe.  By routine the harvests are reaped, by routine the tides rise and ebb; by routine the constellations march in their sublime order across the sky.  The feel of routine is the feel of the mystery of creation.  In the uttermost abysses of life it holds sway. Beautiful and tragic is its systole and diastole.  Without routine there can be no happiness; for there can be no endurance, no expectation, no security, no peace, no old or new, no past or future, no memory and no hope."

 (John Cowper Powys, The Philosophy of Solitude)

Relationship in Nature

 "Into this surrounding space, as you sit, or stand, or lie, as necessity may dictate, you fling forth your spirit; and the spirit of what you are gazing at — for every scene that exists hath its spirit — flows back responsively into your mind; until between your mind and this cubic segment of the cosmos there comes to be established a strange and rhythmical harmony, lulling your senses and liberating your soul with a feeling for which at present human language has no name."

(John Cowper Powys, Philosophy of Solitude)

Trees as Saviours

   "Now there is a path along the edge of the small stream flowing near this house where there grows an enormous and very ancient willow. To this aged tree I have given the mystic name of the “Saviour-Tree,” and here and now I recommend to all harassed and worried people who can find in their neighbourhood such a tree—and it needn’t necessarily be a willow—to use it as I do this one.  For the peculiarity of this tree is that you can transfer by a touch to its earth-bound trunk all your most neurotic troubles!  These troubles of yours the tree accepts, and absorbs them into its own magnetic life; so that henceforth they lose their devilish power of tormenting you…"

 (John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)

 

A library...an Oasis of Happiness

"Had I any happy hours at Sherborne School? A few.  It was for example an enchanted pleasure to me, on certain Sunday afternoons, to sit for hours in the school library, a lovely, old, medieval building, with deep window seats that had leather cushions, searching through all manner of ancient and modern volumes, if so be that I might find some paradisic passages of sweet immorality. O books, O book-shops, O libraries, - how, all my long life, have ye, like great Nature herself, fed the desires and nourished the feelings that the stupid brutality of a false morality would fain stamp out! No wonder every tyranny that has ever existed has suppressed, censured and burned books! For in books, and in books alone, save for the indulgent solitudes of Nature, can the individual soul disport itself in sweet security, and laugh at the moral censor. No bullies ever came near this noble and ancient school library. It was, no doubt, to perpetuate and eternalize a sanctuary of this very kind, that the young bookish Tudor—.Vivat Rex Edwardus Sextus! —re-endowed the old monastic institution of St. Aldhelm.

 In this mellow retreat I was as much secluded in a fabulous castle of my own as when I was hidden in the branches of that Druid oak-tree, or climbing amid the precipitous tree-roots above Lovers’ Lane. The sun might fall in warm slanting rays through the mullioned windows, or the rain might stream down the diamonded panes, I was ensconced here in an oasis of happiness where no enemy could find me, where no barking dogs could leap at me and where the loud laugh of the tormentor was reduced to silence."

(John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)